Is GM Howie Roseman The Eagles’ Problem?

On January 29th, the Philadelphia Eagles introduced their new general manager, Howie Roseman. Roseman has been with the organization for 10 years and knows how the team operates. But that said, he has never been a general manager before and as Michael Silver of Yahoo! Sports points out, Roseman may not be giving off a good impression to his colleagues around the NFL.

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According to Silver, Roseman is being viewed as a “shakedown artist,” who came in way too high in his asking price for QB’s Michael Vick and Donovan McNabb. Silver said that executives are likely to hit the “ignored” button whenever he rings their cell phones. That is not a good thing for a first-year general manager.

As Silver correctly points out, everyone in the world knows that the Eagles are desperate to dump McNabb and it’s looking like a very real possibility that Roseman has botched the entire process. He tried to move his star QB. Word got out that he was doing so. No one wants to pay fair market value for him. So now he either is bringing back a QB that knows you don’t want him, or accepting next to nothing for a marquee player. That’s not how this is all supposed to go.

What Roseman needs is a hail mary from some team. He needs someone to step in and get serious about acquiring Donovan. And I really don’t even know if that’s a possibility at this point. We won’t know for sure until all is said and done, but so far we can’t give Roseman very high marks for his on-the-job performance to this point. We knew this wasn’t going well, but I didn’t know he was turning people off around the league.

Now granted, “go trade the face of the franchise for the last 10 years” isn’t one of the easier tasks to have on your plate when you’ve been on the job for two months.¬† But still, there is a way to go about it without having other league execs turning their cell phones off when you ring them up.

Maybe these things wouldn’t happen if the Eagles weren’t always so hell bent on hiring their own and bringing people up through the ranks.  Maybe bring in someone from the outside next time who is much more seasoned.